Daniel Xavier Hammer, Ph.D.

A new combination of optical coherence tomography (OCT), adaptive optics and deep neural networks should enable better diagnosis and monitoring for neuron-damaging eye and brain diseases like glaucoma.

Biomedical engineers at Duke University led a multi-institution consortium to develop the process, which easily and precisely tracks changes in the number and shape of retinal ganglion cells in the eye.

This work appears in a paper published on May 3 in the journal Optica… Continue reading.

Staring at her images of neurons in living humans’ eyes, Zhuolin Liu got an inkling that she could also see traces of another cell type on the surface of the retina. The images came from a study completed as part of her postdoctoral research at Indiana University (IU) Bloomington, and though the focus of that work had been neurons in the retina, the glimpse she got of what looked like macrophages led her to wonder if she and her colleagues could get a better view of the immune cells and probe their dynamics.

Macrophages on the surface of the retina look and act like microglia, the sentinels of the central nervous system. They had been studied extensively in rodents but haven’t been visualized in real time in the eyes of living humans. Doing so, says her collaborator Daniel Hammer, a researcher at the US Food and Drug Administration (FDA), would offer a better understanding of how they protect the eye. “People are familiar with the [saying] that the eye is the window to the brain,” he says. “Retinal imaging gives us a unique platform to study how the macrophages and other cells react to diseases” such as glaucoma, multiple sclerosis, and Alzheimer’s… Continue reading.

WASHINGTON, D.C.— The American Institute for Medical and Biological Engineering (AIMBE) has announced the pending induction of Daniel Xavier Hammer, Ph.D., Deputy Director, Division of Biomedical Physics, Center for Devices and Radiological Health/Office of Science and Engineering Laboratories, U.S. Food and Drug Administration, to its College of Fellows. Dr. Hammer was nominated, reviewed, and elected by peers and members of the College of Fellows For pioneering contributions and leadership in the research and development of innovative biomedical optics and imaging technology..